Vancouver Economist Wins Prestigious Competition

Jan. 19, 2015 - PRLog -- Vancouver based Empirical Foresights announced today that company's Chief Economist Abhay Gupta is one of the winners of the international contest on Future of Foreign Aid. The competition organized by Global Development Network in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invited original and innovative thinking to inform the ongoing discourse on development assistance and its role in post-2015 development finance. The contest was judged through a comprehensive and strict multi-review stage process. The eminent jury comprising of international luminaries and experts selected the winners judged to be the best and most potentially consequential on the basis of their originality, usefulness and analytical quality.


In his essay titled "Doing it wisely: Using financial innovations to improve aid outcomes", Abhay argues that international aid donors don't have enough information and thus these development aid projects suffer from problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. He discusses how financial instruments can be used to change the structure of the incentives for the involved parties. Abhay provides practical policy recommendations for various types of development projects and how the effectiveness of these financial instruments can be evaluated.


Dr. Gupta has a PhD from University of British Columbia and previously worked at OECD, Paris and The Conference Board, New York.